Dear Future Gamer,

In response to the geezer who mentioned that his PC was getting obsolete, it happens. My current machine was a PII 300 with 32 Mb of Ram and a 4 Mb ATI Video Card and a basic SoundBlaster Card. This wasn't good enough, so I upgraded.

Now I'm running a PII-300 with 160Mb of Ram, a Matrox Mystique G200 (16Mb), two Voodoo IIs on SLI and a Dual Hard drive with about 17 Gb of storage with an SB-Live providing me with audio entertainment.

But I accept this isn't enough so very soon I'm upping the specs again. (Although I can't up it much more because I only have an ISA slot, one RAM slot and one drive bay). Why you ask? It's not because I'm a spec junkie, my PC does what it does well, but I also use it for work. Due to this the more power I can get (without resorting to overclocking) the faster I can work. But with this spec you’re right, it currently is great for games.

At my local Game store (the day after the upgrades) I actually sat down and listed - with a friend, the next few upgrades to occur.

The moral of the story? Be prepared for what you buy to be obsolete soon. When I bought my PC, it had the fastest processor available, but now it's slower than others. So save and buy the best kit you can afford for the time then keep saving and upgrade a little later.

No PC can ever be fully future proof because the technology behind the design and manufacture keeps on changing, so don't whine about it (it happens) but put a little away each week and every so often upgrade. I knew when I bought mine that a couple of months later it wouldn't be the fastest on the block, but I didn't need to get a new one immediately – I just slowly and gradually chopped and changed parts to build up the spec, before changing the processor.

David Rapp

FG: It’s true folks. Buy a PC to play games on and you’ll need to update the machine’s technical specification regularly if you want to remain state of the art. This costs money. Be warned.